“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush

Thursday, May 21, 2015

The FUKUS Libyan Catastrophe - What was the Neocons and Netanyahu’s advice in 2011?

Netanyahu: World pressure on Libya must also be directed at Iran

PM calls for strong international action against Libya and Iran regimes, says world must send message to Libyan people that would be heard in Iran.

By Eli Ashkenaziand The Associated Press| Mar. 1, 2011 | 6:35 PM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed Tuesday for strong international action against the regimes of Libya and Iran.

Netanyahu stressed that the world must act against Iran as it is currently acting against Libya. He said the world needs to send a message to the people of Libya that they have support in their struggle against ruler Muammar Gadhafi - a message that would be heard in Iran.

Netanyahu said an aggressive response against Gadhafi will send a clear message of encouragement and hope to the Iranian people that nobody has forgotten them, adding that those same steps must be directed at Iran.

Netanyahu was speaking Tuesday during a trip to Israel's north.

Last week, Netanyahu warned that the Middle East instability may last for years, and while expressing hope that the Arab world and Iran will undergo true democratization, he said Israel must be prepared for every outcome.

Bernardino León, head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya, told NPR last week that Libya is on the verge of complete economic and political collapse. Adding to this, he asserted, there could be more than half a million people waiting in the country to seek asylum across the Mediterranean in Europe.

“[W]e know that there are a lot of human rights abuses — asking for money, asking for prostitution in the case of women — something very common for people transiting through Libya,” León continued.

Commenting on the situation, David J. Francis from the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, a foundation established to strengthen peacebuilding policy and practice, told MintPress News that he was aghast at the reaction of the Western audience watching the crisis unfold.

Francis explained to MintPress:

“Part of the deal of bringing Gadhafi back from the cold to rehabilitate him as a legitimate player in the international community after spending decades of presenting him as the ‘Mad Dog’ of the Middle East was the fact that he would control immigration, and he delivered on that.”

Francis was referring to negotiations between Libya and the United Kingdom, which began the normalization of relations between the North African country and other Western countries, including the United States, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

Despite this, U.S., French, British, and NATO forces attacked the country in 2011, hoping rebels on the ground would overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Washington also spent $25 million in nonlethal aid to support rebels in Libya. Some rebel groups were connected to al Qaeda.

Chaos immediately ensued, followed by a self-indulgent and triumphalist American media and political apparatus that proclaimed victory and righteousness following the destruction of the country. Even today, Libya’s oil fields, controlled by the country’s National Oil Company, are under constant threat from extremist groups and militias.

“President Obama made the right, albeit belated, decision to join with allies and try to stop Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from slaughtering thousands of Libyans,” The New York Times editorial section proclaimed on March 28, 2011.

Writing for The Intercept earlier this year, Glenn Greenwald noted that advocates for the war, like Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation, and Nick Kristof, a columnist for The Times, applauded the U.S. decision to support anti-Gadhafi rebels in Libya.

Meanwhile, NATO leaders David Cameron, the British premier, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, visited the country for what Scott Peterson, Istanbul Bureau Chief for The Christian Science Monitor, described as “a victory lap” and a “pep talk.”

Military intervention into Libya was preceded by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which secured legal authority to intervene. The resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya, similar to what Turkey currently wants to implement over Syria, strengthened the arms embargo, and opened the door to the arming of anti-Gadhafi rebels.

Permanent U.N. Security Council members China and Russia abstained from the vote, but, more importantly, did not vote against the resolution, which allowed the intervention to legally proceed. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s current prime minister and former president, has since stated: “Russia did not use its power of veto [of Security Council Resolution 1973] for the simple reason that I do not consider the resolution in question wrong.”

He added, “It would be wrong for us to start flapping about now and say that we didn’t know what we were doing. This was a conscious decision on our part.”

However, it was the U.S. and its NATO allies which spearheaded the operation, with France and England taking the initiative. A no-fly zone was imposed over the country, and from March to October NATO bombed Gadhafi forces until the Libyan leader was shot dead by rebels.

President Obama declared on Oct. 20, 2011: “[T]his is a momentous day in the history of Libya. The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted.” But that was only the beginning for Libya and the fallout NATO actions had across the African continent.

Alan J. Kuperman, associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and author of “The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda,” wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year:

“Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased several fold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).”

Mali, Nigeria and Somalia: The beginning of an end

Fallout from the invasion didn’t affect only Libya, though. Ethnic Tuaregs from Mali, a nomadic Berber people, who Gadhafi had recruited to fight in his army in the 1990s, returned home to fight against the Bamako government after the Libyan leader’s fall. They brought with them heavy weaponry.

“So the actual outbreak of the war in Mali is directly linked to the fallout of the exit of Gadhafi and the way and manner it was mismanaged,” Francis, who is also the head of Peace Studies and director of the John & Elnora Ferguson Centre for African Studies at the University of Bradford in the U.K., told MintPress.

“Together with previous Tuareg rebel groups, they formed the MNLA [National Movement for the Liberation on Azawad] in 2011 as the political military platform to continue their fight for self-rule. It was these heavily armed and well-trained MNLA-led fighters that routed the government forces in March 2012 and declared northern Mali the independent state of Azawad.”

The MNLA is a conglomeration of Tuareg rebels with historic grievances against the Bamako government and Ansar al-Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”). The movement is led by former Tuareg rebel leader Iyad Ag Ghaly, who is thought to have links to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Delaware Sen. Christopher A. Coons, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, declared in 2012 that northern Mali had become “the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.” Those extremists included al-Qaida and ISIS.

By April 2013, the situation was so serious, Francis wrote that, “Northern Mali had become not only their [religious extremists] new operational base, but also a magnet for foreign jihadist fighters. Mali, with its mountainous and desert terrain, is fast becoming the centre of gravity for jihadists and has led to a shift away from the traditional jihadist focus on South Asia to North Africa and the Sahel.”

Still, it should be added that Mali’s internal problems existed well before the fall of Gadhafi. NATO intervention in the North African state served as a spark to an already unstable situation. “Although the conflict in Libya may have provided the trigger for the Malian crisis, the fundamental problems that caused the crisis are largely domestic,” Francis noted.

Dramatic developments have since taken place.

On Monday, three Malian soldiers were killed in Bambara Maounde, Mali, about 73 miles south of Timbuktu. The violence comes on the heels of a peace deal between the Bamako government and rebel separatists to the north which was supposed to be signed last week. The signing was stalled because the Coordination of Movements for Azawad (CMA), an alliance of Tuareg and Arab-led rebel groups, demanded that amendments be made to the agreement.

Alan Kuperman, the professor and author, wrote: “The terrorism problem was exacerbated by the leakage of sensitive weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenal to radical Islamists across North Africa and the Middle East.”

Many of those weapons are believed to have spread throughout the continent, leading to unrest in Burkina Faso. They’re even believed to have fallen into the hands of Boko Haram, which has been leading a religious extremist insurrection in Nigeria, and al-Shabab in Somalia.

On a recent trip to Africa, Francis was told by African Union intelligence sources that most of Boko Haram’s arms came from Gadhafi’s arsenal. And the same can be said of some of al-Shabab’s weaponry. “Some of the Boko Haram terrorists were already training in a disused warehouse in Mogadishu [Somalia],” he added.

He said, “The arms were coming through the desert region from Mali. And of course when you cross from Mali, you can find your way from Mauritania, and from Mauritania to Nigeria. It has been easy.”

Meanwhile, Kuperman has warned about how intervention that is packaged and sold as “humanitarian” should be viewed in the future.

Writing in International Security in 2013, a journal for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Kuperman asserted:

“NATO’s experience in Libya offers important lessons for humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. First, potential interveners should beware both misinformation — resulting from inaccurate reporting or their own biased perceptions — and disinformation from concerted propaganda campaigns.”

He explained how American media regularly played into the hands of those propaganda campaigns and helped to disseminate disinformation:

“Libya’s initial uprising was not peaceful, nationwide, and democratic—as reported and perceived in the West—but violent, regional, and riven with tribalism and Islamist extremism. Qaddafi’s response was not to slaughter peaceful protesters or bombard civilian areas indiscriminately, as reported in the West, but rather to target rebels and violent protesters relatively narrowly, reducing collateral harm to noncombatants.”

The Saudi picked up the Libya market share of 1 million barrels of sweet crude sold per day.

Who benefited from that, but the Sauds and their allies ...The US and ISrael.Same as in Iraq, only there the US took 3 million barrels per day off the market.In Iran, probably another 3 million barrels per day not on the market due to the US led sanctions regime.

It may not be about the oil, but it is about the money.

Riad Muasses: “What is your position on France and President Sarkozy? France was the first country to recognise the Provisional Council.”

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi: “Firstly Sarkozy must repay Libya the money he took for his election campaign. We financed his election campaign and we have all the details and we are ready to publish them. The first thing we ask of this clown Sarkozy is that he repay this money to the Libyan people. We helped him become president so that he would help the Libyan people but he has disappointed us. And very soon we will publish all the details and the documents and banking pay slips.“

The documents released by the New York Times also show that Clinton received numerous briefing memos about Libya from Blumenthal, a longtime friend of the Clintons who was not employed by the State Department. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Blumenthal was also involved with a possible business venture in the country at the time.

Two of those memos from (Sidney) Blumenthal came in the days immediately following the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks.

In one, sent on September 12, Blumenthal suggested that top security officers in the country believed that the attacks "were inspired by what many devout Libyan viewed as a sacrilegious internet video on the prophet Mohammed originating in America." Clinton forwarded that information to top adviser Jake Sullivan with the message "more info."

But another memo sent the following day indicated that the attacks may have actually been carried out by a militia group. Blumenthal wrote that officials in the country "believe that the attackers having prepared to launch their assault took advantage of the cover provided by the demonstrations in Benghazi protesting an internet production seen as disrespectful to the prophet Mohammed."

George Stephanopoulos is, of course, the ABC news anchor whose $75,000 in donations to the Clinton foundation have reminded the world of his longtime ties to Bill Clinton, for whom he worked from 1991 to 1997.

But before Stephanopoulos had entered the picture, another journalist with an activist history, Sidney Blumenthal, had already established himself as an admirer of Bill Clinton and as a confidant of both the future president and his wife, Hillary. That relationship, begun in the 1980s, would last for decades and continues to make news today.

In 2007, Blumenthal advised Hillary Clinton's campaign for president, using his rhetorical razor on her rival, the future President Obama. When she became secretary of state she reportedly wanted to offer a job to Blumenthal but was blocked by the White House. Nonetheless, he remained an informal adviser and worked for the Clinton foundation. In those roles, he sent her 25 emails relevant to U.S. policy in Libya and that country's political and economic future.

Blumenthal, 66, was raised in Chicago and graduated from Brandeis University in Boston in 1969. He worked for the alternative Real Paper there. In 1980 he published a prescient analytical book called The Permanent Campaign, describing how fixation on electoral politics had begun to paralyze governing in the U.S.

He has subsequently written four other books, including Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War, a description of presidential politics in 1988. He also gathered his criticisms of the presidency of George W. Bush in "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime".

Throughout his career, Blumenthal has had a propensity for feuding with other writers. Some were ideological adversaries, such as Sullivan. Some had published false stories about him, as Matt Drudge admitted to doing in 1997.

Others were colleagues, such as Kelly at The New Yorker. Some were friends or former friends, such as Christopher Hitchens, with whom he fell out over specific events or issues. In 2013, Blumenthal found himself dueling with critics of his son, Max, whose book "Goliath" compared excesses of the Jewish state in Israel to those of the Nazi regime in Germany.

... compared excesses of the Jewish state in Israel to those of the Nazi regime in Germany.

So many members of American Jewry see the similarities ... One wonders, how could they all loath themselves?Or is the most obvious answer the correct one, it is the government of ISrael that is loathsome.

An ad hominem attack often is an important signal indicating that the attacker is wrong, very wrong indeed. It is nothing else than an open admission by “the other side” that they have no more reasonable arguments, that they are resorting to unreasonable notions, and that they have lost not just the plot but also the debate.

In other words, being personally attacked in this way is a compliment and an unfailing sign of victory – and, if that is so, we should be proud of every single ad hominem attack we get after a well-reasoned debate.

In the early hours of Wednesday a clash occurred in Tlacotepec in the municipality of General Heliodoro Castillo, located in the mountainous area of Guerrero, leaving a toll of 10-12 dead and 20 wounded.

The confrontation between two armed groups, likely the Los Rojos and Los Ardillos, occurred during the late hours of Tuesday into the early hours of Wednesday.

Tlacotepec communities and other municipalities in the mountainous area of ​​Guerrero are the areas of poppy crops, so the dispute is between organized crime groups is ongoing for control of the region.

In a special report on security in Guerrero, the CNDH reported that as of August 2013, the number of people displaced by violence in Tlacotepec, was between 700 and 900, in a town with a population of only 6000.

An ad hominem attack often is an important signal indicating that the attacker is wrong, very wrong indeed.

It is nothing else than an open admission by “the other side” that they have no more reasonable arguments, that they are resorting to unreasonable notions, and that they have lost not just the plot but also the debate. In other words, being personally attacked in this way is a compliment and an unfailing sign of victory – and, if that is so, we should be proud of every single ad hominem attack we get after a well-reasoned debate.

desert ratWed Nov 19, 09:41:00 AM ESTHere you go, in bobal's own words, calling for an Eugenics Program, for black citizens of the United States.

bobal said... ah, hell, after having thought it over, and considerging that my brother was a doctor, and my sis a med tech, who almost got roughed up by some niggers in Oakland, California, maybe the best thing to do is let the niggers abort, abort, abort themselves.

They do a good job of that.

Thu Nov 13, 01:29:00 AM EST

... the best thing to do is let the niggers abort, abort, abort themselves.

Despite some last-minute drama, the Senate on Thursday advanced a measure that would give President Obama "fast-track" authority to finalize a pending trade pact with leading Pacific nations. - Los Angeles Times

As the book’s title ("China’s Coming War With Asia") makes clear, Mr. Holslag does not see the future as bright, and this is mainly the result of a domestic political system “that makes China almost pre-programmed to crush the existing liberal world order as soon as it has the means to do so.” What Mr. Holslag regards as China’s current restraint—an assessment perhaps already rendered out of date by recent events in the South China Sea—is a temporary product of weakness to be abandoned as soon as China becomes more powerful.

Not that there’ll be any comfort should China’s economic growth stall. Rising powers often become more nationalistic and dangerous when their growth stagnates, Mr. Holslag warns. Either way, war in Asia has become more likely.

desert ratWed Nov 19, 09:41:00 AM ESTHere you go, in bobal's own words, calling for an Eugenics Program, for black citizens of the United States.

bobal said... ah, hell, after having thought it over, and considerging that my brother was a doctor, and my sis a med tech, who almost got roughed up by some niggers in Oakland, California, maybe the best thing to do is let the niggers abort, abort, abort themselves.

They do a good job of that.

Thu Nov 13, 01:29:00 AM EST

... the best thing to do is let the niggers abort, abort, abort themselves.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.